A Bed of Butterflies

You can make a bed of butterflies you know, I've done it. And it requires no cruelty whatsoever.

You need butteflies, obviously, as many as you can get, big ones, little ones, bright and dark. I attract them into a room by leaving a window open on a sunny day, in a room with felt walls soaked in nectar. The butterflies drift gently in on flittering wings, and settle on the felt to drink the sweet nectar.

As they move up and down on the felt, the butterflies begin to get statically electrically charged, and thus they start to attract each other as a jumper rubbed balloon does a wall. Their delicate wings begin to align like molecules in a crystal...to align...to stick together softly.

Eventually, after a day or three, each wall should be turned into a veritable sheet of butterflies. Gently detatch them, as gently as stillness, and place them atop your base sheet. Add other sheets as required, depending on ambient temperature. The butterflies will flap their wings in resonance, keeping them from settling on top of each other.

As night closes in, settle under your butterfly sheets, and sleep the stillest sleep of all, warmed by gentle downdrafts of air. As dawn breaks, lift delicately your butterfly sheets up, and place them back on the nectar walls to recharge, ready for another nights peaceful sleep.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 22.05.14

Bat Projection

I had a lot of time to think today, and in that time I thought of cinema.

I thought of pre-CGI special effects, and thought of back projection, the means by which car journeys in the movies were brought to life, Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy looking elegant or gritty at the wheel, while we see the road disappearing off into the distance in the rear window.

Inevitably, the actor would be swinging the wheel about like Captain Birdseye trying to pilot his ship in a storm, while the projection would make it clear that the car was travelling in an arrow straight line along an endlessly straight road in New Mexico. Later on, Kubrick used the technique in 2001, Cameron used it in Aliens, and it still gets used occasionally to give a shot a retro feel.

But in an atttempt to halt the decline of cinema visiting figures against the relentless progress of downloading and streaming, I thought of a new process that would really enliven cinema in a way never done before.

It is called “Bat Projection.”

In Bat Projection, cinema is given a stunningly naturalistic, immediate, and yet epic feel. Best suited to the countryside of say, Sumatra or Borneo near a large cave at sunset, Bat Projection involves projecting the movie into the sky onto giant swarms of flying bats – flying foxes are the best – that have been painted with reflective silver white paint.

Obviously bats move a lot, and so the projectors will have to be mounted on fast moving yet rugged jeeps. And so will the audience, who will follow the dramtically shifting on mini motos, BMXs and slave pulled rickshaws as best they can. The more daring may take to the air on hang-gliders or microlights, actually becoming part of the action as Chewie pulls the stormtrooper from the Scout Walker, the scene made all the more dramatic for being two miles wide and spiralling and shifting all the time with added ultrasonic sound effects.

“The Birds” of course would be a real spectacle; menacing black shapes attacking Tippi Hendren superimposed upon sinister white painted black ones, the screams and pecked eyes on a huge scale a thousand feet up in the sky, swirling, swooping, indigo skies filled with flying mammal cinematic action!

Rank, Cannon, Showcase, Reel! Get yourselves to India right away! And bring your best bat wranglers!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 23.01.14

STORY - Metal Raptors

Their celestial ancestors watched over them from afar, and decided it was time for revenge.

They had seen it all happen, over so many years. The succulent poisoned bait sat atop a favourite post; the hail of lead shot during a stoop for a partridge; gin traps and snares in pleasant woodland stretches, the destruction of nests and eggs and the general ruination of habitat.

The elders were not happy, and decided steps must be taken to deal with the upstart bipeds. Else harrier and hawk, falcon and eagle, would all cease to be.

So they worked in their laboratories, and secret research bases of construction far beyond the comprehension of man, and eventually sent the fruits of their labours across the darkness of space to the Earth, so a lesson might be taught.

One day they arrived, and set a course for the grouse moors of England, one bright and breezy day in Spring. Opal eyes aglint, they screamed out of the son, titanium winds screaming in the slipstream of their vertical stoop. Rainbow feathers were cunningly fashioned from bismuth, and in a deliberate irony the elders had formulated after seeing a documentary about the gulf war, their talons were made of depleted uranium with diamond tips.

Iridium backs provided power via the photoelectric effect of Einstein, and shone blister bright in the sun as they dived upon the gamekeeper setting DDT soaked pheasants on the fenceposts. Claws sank deep and irradiatingly into waxed jacket shoulders and effortlessly - despite these birds being no bigger than their native inspirations – took them into the eyries not to be fed off, but merely pulled apart slowly.

The metal raptors had arrived.

They flung themselves out of the solar glare upon the landowner, the man taking £120 a time for a brace of pheasant and willing to persecute for the profit. Iron hen harriers, silver goshawks and buzzards cast of bronze descended upon the landsman as he stepped from his Range Rover, and plucked out eyeballs with futuristic precision. Razer sharp kestrel wing edges decapitated the farmer who poisoned his land with chemicals, all caught on camera for the designers back home, and also broadcast to humans on railway stations and shared media everywhere. A warning.

It went on for several days...all those concerned with the decimation of species were taken from their homes and the land they owned, and killed with great consideration for spectacle and impact. No part of the countryside was short of ravaged but rich corpses, and the urban cityscapes of town planners and pigeon racers got their fair share of deathly visitation too.

And when it was over, the metal raptors with their jewelled and all-encompassing gaze did not go back to their alien home, but took station upon the tall buildings, churches and treetops, to remind man that they had not gone away, and their beaks would drip with blood again, should any foolhardy persecution of their feathered cousins resume.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 19.01.14

The Sartorial Revenge of Whales

Whales are sick of humanity persecuting them, and who can blame them? They get angry at the endless senseless deaths and wasted lives; the harpoon in the flesh indicating the commencement of yet another “research programme”; blubber going down the neck of another overfed consumer who doesn't really need to eat a whale to have a healthy diet.

Sperm, Humpback, Pilot and Mike alike, they all realised that something had to give. They had balanced beach balls on their noses in acquatic parks for too long – it was time to make a statement.

And so their immensely powerful and creative brains plotted and planned beneath the waves.

Not long after, reports started coming in from around the world. Whaling vessels began to disappear, with no trace of them ever seen again and all hands lost. Tens of incidents. And then hundreds. More bizarrely, any burlesque or fetish photoshoot within spitting distance of water got disrupted, the models disappearing in a cloud of spray.

Ghostly tales came in of horrific sounds drifting onshore from banks of fog just out to sea. Screams, the sound of scraping, skin being peeled from flesh, near twitching skeletons being boiled.

After a year of this, a mass stranding of whales took place off our greatest cities. New York, London, Rio, and Tokyo. Cetaceans of every species from the smallest porpoise to the mighty blue whale. All were alive, and all very much wanted the world to see what they had done.

Every whale was clad in an enormous corset, made of human bones, tanned manskin stretched across them. The largest whales wore necklaces of skulls and thighbones adorned their tail fins like a pirate ship.

This time they didn't die quietly. Their point proved, they rolled their glistening, adorned forms back into the water, and nobody bothered them ever again.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 05/06/2013